Fan Drive!!!
I’m having a Fan Drive!!
I made it up myself. It means I’m making a huge effort to increase my fan networks.
Mainly my goal is to go from the 200 Facebook fans I have now to 1000. But I also want people to sign up for my mailing list, friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, and just get into my music.
I really racked my brain to figure out how to do this- just go all-out to get people to sign up for fanhood in a short amount of time- and I really only came up with two things:
1. Use the network that’s already in place. Just ask people who already follow me on Twitter and whatnot to become my fan on Facebook. (Of course I want them to do like mailing list and stuff too but you can only advertise so much at once.) Ask them to retweet my request, invite their friends, post it to their Facebook walls. Just try to get the network to reach out with me.
2. Go busking for fans. Play on the street or in the subways, but instead of accepting tips, just hand out flyers with my website, facebook, etc. I was hesitant ’cause I don’t have the balls to do something like that by myself and didn’t have anyone to play with me, but I had a friend who wanted to come with just to hand out flyers, so we said let’s do it. We’re gonna do tomorrow, Thursday, somewhere around Columbus Circle from like 5-7, and Saturday afternoon, which is supposed to be really nice, closer to the park.
So far it’s a little slow going. I thought I’d get a little more help from the Twitter and Facebook crews in asking, but I’ve only had a couple friends pass my info along, even by Twitter. And still a lot of Twitter followers and Facebook “friends” who aren’t my Facebook fans or on my mailing list or anything. I even sent out one mass email to my church choir and one to my Gilbert and Sullivan group and haven’t heard anything back from any of them. (Maybe some of them signed up for my mailing list, haven’t checked that yet.)
It’s like, I ask a lot of favors from everyone. Some of them are easier than others. Like, some things I ask for involve money, like sponsor my album, come to my show, buy my t-shirt. Some things involve inconvenience, like let me sleep on your couch, give me a ride, help me find a gig. Then there are these little things that take no money, almost no time, almost no inconvenience. And people still don’t do them.
To be fair, I wouldn’t use my well-cultivated platforms to promote just anyone- it would have to be someone I really believed in, or somebody I cared about enough to help. But if someone I’m actually friends with, or someone I really admire, asks me for a shout-out, I am happy to help. I mean, I know I sometimes give mentions to talented friends without being asked, you know?
On the other hand, the best thing about being a small-time artist is how much you appreciate every single person who helps. Every repost, retweet, and new fan signed up makes me just so happy. I’m so grateful to those who actually make that effort.
So, so far I’ve only gone from 195 Facebook Fans to 204. Hopefully I have better luck with the playing out and handing out flyers than I have just begging people to repost. ‘Cause I still have 796 fans to go to reach my goal!!
Tomorrow playing my guitar on the street for strangers while friends pass out flyers and take email addresses. Swing by! We’ll see how it goes!
In the meantime, don’t you totally just want to help????
Please be-fan me on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Sign up for my mailing list on my website. If you do like my music, or my writing, or just think I’m hot (amazing how much that has to do with it most of the time), please repost, retweet, invite friends, suggest, whatever you can do. Like I stated above, I am so not-famous that every one person who helps just makes my day.
Does anybody else have ideas of what could constitute a Fan Drive?
Classical vs rock marketing
Hi everyone!
I have so many things to talk about now, but so many of them are important enough that I feel like I need to break them up into smaller posts.
First I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot lately. It’s about marketing, presentation, web presence. How there are different ways of doing it. How they work and how they don’t. Yeah, it’s a heavy topic.
I’ve always been controversial, at least in the classical music field. How can a sweet adorable charming talented bombshell like me cause controversy, you ask? Well, I’ve pretty much never had a problem getting people to love me- teachers, directors, conductors, colleagues- I get along with everyone I work with. But there’s always been a lot of “No one’s going to take you seriously if you do it like that.”
Back in college- and even in high school- it was mostly based on the way I dressed, and to an extent acted. I was a total hippie and would be decked out to the nines in bellbottoms and flowers and headbands and beads. And then I’d walk into the room and nail down an aria in polished coloratura and people would be like, oh shit, what? And in the end nobody ever gave me attitude like “I don’t want you dressing/behaving/carrying yourself like that in my studio/company/production,” it was more like “Nobody else besides me is ever going to cast you unless you be more normal.” I heard it enough times that I had a little personal crisis over it, talked it over with everyone in the world I trusted, and finally came to the conclusion that I would stay true to myself. Don’t misunderstand, I always dressed nice for performances and had great, if occasionally off-beat, stage comportment- this is about my day-to-day life we’re talking about. But my conclusion was that A. nobody I ever worked with at any level really minded per se, they were just looking out for my future- but my personal experience consistantly showed that the people I worked with were never so shallow that they were put off, and B. if anybody WAS so against me-as-I-really-was that they didn’t want to work with me because I was a little hyper and colorful, I probably shouldn’t be working with that person anyway.
By the time I finished college/studying abroad and was starting to become a professional, it became about the web pages. Soon every singer had to have a website with their resume and headshot and mp3s. But I had something over those n00B’s- I had already designed and coded my own webpage, for my (short-lived) band in Paris. Not only did I already know how to do the website thing, but I also had a rock band view of web marketing. It wasn’t til well-meaning people started criticising my website that I managed to put it into words: the classical artsists were designing their websites like resumes, hoping that artistic directors would go to their website, check out their stuff, and hire them (or at least invite them to audition). My website wasn’t built to lure in potential employers, who I truly did not believe were out googling random sopranos to hire. It was built to lure in fans. People who would come to my shows, tell their friends, become a part of my “team,” and eventually buy my albums and merchandise. So my content was more casual, and I presented all my musical projects in one place- others were telling me “No one will take you seriously as an opera singer if you have your rock music on your site.” No one suggested I couldn’t DO both- well at the beginning they did, but over time I proved that I had the technique to pull off both so everyone left me alone about that- just that I should hide one from the other, or at least not present them in the same place. But I knew the fans would be interested in both, and again I told myself, if anyone has that big of a problem with it, I probably don’t want to work with them.
Now that the internet has expanded, it’s become not even so much about presenting more than one kind of music, but about everything else one puts out there on the internet. What are you putting on YouTube, on Twitter? Are you keeping a nice neat polished little package, or are you just puking up onto the screen everything that happens in your life? And who is seeing this, and how much do they care?
Things just get more and more complicated. But here’s my take.
The haters think anything that’s unique is “unprofessional.” A lot of these people who specialize in Marketing still think of your web presence as a resume by which you will get hired. They consider you to be “in competition” with other singers like you, thus necessitating serious refinement. In the classical and theatre worlds, there is truly something to this- but I’ll get to that.
The grassroots movement in popular music want you to communicate. They want to see behind-the-scenes footage, rough drafts of new projects, and insight into your daily life. They want refinement, too, but only in the finished product- your album, your book, your concert, which they will only be more excited about after having followed your progress along the way.
Here’s the catch. In popular music, like many things, an indie model presides. I create something, I sell it to fans. In formal opera and other forms of theatre, you are mostly not selling yourself directly to fans- you are going through an opera company that hires you for their production, and people see you through that. In other art forms, the “distributor” has become little more than a middleman who puts his seal of approval on a product that gets it into the right shopping venues. In opera- management aside, that being a whole other story- the “distributor” is the opera company, and you can’t just present opera without going through a company, even if you form your own.
So first it sounded like I was endorsing grassroots marketing, and now it sounds like I’m eschewing it. In reality, I recommend a compromise- and you can lean either way, depending on your goals. here’s why:
I still truly do not believe that casting directors are up googling “coloratura soprano” late at night looking for someone to hire. I DO believe that they are more and more likely to check out an artist’s website- if they are already thinking of hiring them, ie, at the recommendation of a colleague, or after having heard them in an audition or another production. At that point they will be past the stage of “should I take this person serioulsy?” I believe that traditional marketing- here’s how great I am, see how many names I can drop, look how great everything’s going for me- is on its way out for us. Several years ago artists were first learning to market themselves independantly, and it was unique and interesting. Now everyone is doing it and we’re sick of it. Everyone who’s ever had a MySpace page knows that you can’t log in without unsolicited friend requests from bands who want you to “Check out our tunes,” come to their shows, buy their EP, order a thong with their logo on it from CafePress, and read their awesome review from some no-name blogger. Everyone with a tuba sends out mass emails (unfortunately often without permission) to inform everyone they know about all these “awesome shows I got coming up.” And never get cornered by a bass player who has a show coming up this Sunday, or you will get a monologue about how cool the opening acts are and who’s gonna get up on stage and sing back-up vocals to what song until you declare firmly that there’s no way you could possibly make it (and then you’ll start hearing about the show they have coming up after that one). Classical musicians haven’t been to quite as many marketing and networking seminars as rockers have, but those that have caught the indie spirit make the same faux pas everyone else does.
The problem is that no one wants to be sold to. They want to belong to. The grassroots movement now is less in your face about promoting, and more personal. Where a website with a list of upcoming shows and a collection of press photos used to be appropriate, now we have comedians, singers, writers, actors blogging about their career experience, twittering about their day, and posting YouTube footage of live gigs instead of just finished products. They are often even communicating directly with their fans, through comments posted to their output.
There is an incompatibility here. It’s impossible to be both 100% professional and 100% personal. Each artist has to decide for themselves which way they want to lean. If you post a picture of you practicing in your pajamas, some people will smile and feel just a little closer to you- and some people will make a face and think how stupid you look and go back to practicing in their own pajamas. If you post a list of rave review quotes, some people will feel reassured by your success, and others will roll their eyes and pass you by, having heard it all before. So you have to decide who it’s more important for you to appeal to.
I try to find a balance, of course, but I find myself- consciously, not accidentally- leaning more and more towards the grassroots movement. There are practical reasons for this. First, a lot of what I do IS indie and is geared towards fans. It might be different if I were really ONLY trying to get hired in opera houses (which of course is something I am doing, just not exclusively), but I also perform and record as a rock musician, I do solo recitals, I have my own projects- for these things I need to appeal to my fan base directly. Secondly, my natural inclination is to be an open and friendly person. Even as far back as high school English classes I was criticized on my papers for being too informal (but then another teacher would just rave about how funny my writing was). That’s just how I am- I can smooth it over if need be- I can lay on the formal jargon with the best of them- but why fake it if I don’t have to? Lastly, I know what works for ME. I want to reach employers, casting directors, producers, conductors, the same way I’ve reached the ones I’ve already worked with, the same way I’ve reached many of you: by making them fall in love with me a little. I rarely fail to win someone over who knows me. If someone has gone through the trouble to read far enough into my blog, my tweets, my life, even if it was with nefarious purpose, I like to think that I’ll have charmed them into becoming my fan too.
Finally, a disclaimer and further reading. Disclaimer: “I am not a role model.” I am a moderately successful artist. I sing leading roles in semi-professional companies. My career is definitely on the up-and-up, as things really are getting better and better for me, but I am not a full-time professional singer. I have toured as a rock musician, but am not famous (hope to be soon when my album comes out). So feel free to take my philosophy with a grain of salt, at least until I have some bigger successes under my belt. I am a person who has thought and read and written about this stuff a lot.
Further reading:
Here is a really interesting blog about the new model for artists making a living. I hope to one day have true fans like that.
Here’s one that’s not quite as thought-provoking but is another example of indie artists trying to find a new model.
Of course any book from 2006 about blogging is already going to be a bit out of date, but the premise on the change in the whole marketing model is vital food for thought.
Here’s an Onion article that’s a perfect example of musician marketing getting annoying.
Finally, as a reward for making it this far, here’s a topless pic of me.
Why am I so sick?
I’ve been sick for two and a half weeks. It’s normal to lose one’s ability to sing for that long, but to be continuously sick? What the hell is wrong with me? It started like a normal cold, but on the mild side. Sore throat, tired, groggy, overall sick-feeling. Over the course of about a week it turned to nasal congestion/sneezing, then eventually to coughing. This is all normal. For me, this is how a cold progresses. Except it was supposed to stop there. Instead, the coughing got worse- it got really bad. I couldn’t get out of a Sunday matinee performance of The Sorcerer (or afford to miss my last church gig, which was payday), so I went, coughed the whole way to Connecticut no matter how many cough drops I took, sang with like 30% of my normal voice and no high notes (they made an announcement beforehand that I was sick, thankfully), laughed it off (it was just a show in a retirement home, not something that was going to get written up- besides, their audience had heard me before singing when I COULD sing so I wasn’t worried about my ego), figured I’d go home and be hopefully better in time for the show on Thursday. I kept coughing and feeling sick all week, and my voice Thursday was hardly better at all!
Things only got worse from there- by the time we finished Thursday I had a killer sore throat. I assumed it was from pushing my voice (rare for me- I have good technique and never get tired from singing, unless I’m really working out the high notes), but the sore throat lasted for days, and got worse. I really wanted to pull out of the show on Saturday, which was not only an all-day affair, as I had to get up ungodly early to catch a bus upstate and get back late at night, but was for a new audience, and in Oneonta NY which is close to Cooperstown and I was scared to death someone from Glimmerglass would happen to show up and make a mental note about how much I sucked. (As far as I know, that didn’t happen?) But while I couldn’t say I was singing better than Thursday, I couldn’t be sure I could sing worse either, and the company was adamant that they wanted me to sing. When I opened my mouth in the first act and heard how awful I sounded, I was so upset I literally cried onstage. I hope the audience didn’t notice. I can cry and sing opera at the same time.
I cried my way through half of the first act, I was so upset. Less because I was still sick and more because I let myself be guilted into singing against all my better judgement. I was so angry at myself for not having the balls to say no, for putting my career and my voice in jeopardy by singing when I clearly shouldn’t (mind you, everyone in the audience thought I sounded lovely and the company members could mostly tell I wasn’t up to par but still thought I sounded good and couldn’t understand what I wasn’t happy about- some of them only noticed was I wasn’t singing the high notes, but I knew and a trained ear would have known that I kinda sucked). I was also having one of the worst periods in my life, and each time I was offstage (not a lot of time) I had to bolt upstairs to the bathroom to take care of girly business. But every time someone thanked me (and the 2nd soprano, who was also sick, but she’s not a professional singer), especially publicly, for coming through for the company, for pulling through, for making the show go on- it made me ANGRY. They never understood what they had coerced me to do- I could have been heard by someone important and seriously set back my career, I could have damaged my voice, I could have (and probably did) prolong my vocal suffering, I could have (and definitely did) delay my recovery by not being at home resting- and every day I’m sick means auditions cancelled, practicing and rehearsals fallen behind on, and other performances- if not cancelled- not sung to the best of my ability. Not to mention the stress- I’m already worried about my performance that’s over a month away, just because as this point I don’t know when I’ll be well again. People should have been yelling at me and scolding me for singing, not applauding. Sure, the show must go on, but it’s not my fault you don’t have a cover for me- not to mention you knew two weeks ago that I was sick- plenty of time to have found one, if even from the chorus.
I had a nice time besides singing badly and crying a lot and being stuck in the bathroom half the time. The theatre was great and they treated us so well- they even gave us chocolate and beer! Nice beer! Microbrews and stuff! Hope I can get them to hire me for a recital. 
Anyways, to finish (not finish) the saga of my illness, the sore throat persisted and got worse, and then Sunday and Monday I threw up. Just once per day, but it was so weird. I don’t have a fever or anything, so wtf? Can’t be the flu. Sunday I was nauseous (and felt truly awful, the worst day of the whole cold) all day, but yesterday it really snuck up on me. Today I am still coughing, the throat is starting to feel better, but I’m still very drained, and now my left ear is stopped up.
This could actually be a problem. I do have a stupid problem with my ears where every several years one will get so blocked up I have to get it cleaned out by a doctor. Nothing else works- not those drops you put in, not the rubber bulb that shoots water into your ear, not even candeling. I will be so sad if I have to shell out $$$ for a doctor’s visit. I just got my loan for my album, still have credit card debt from the tour, and now have to pay off my plane ticket to Santa Fe to interview Natalie Dessay- and I have no place to stay there, can’t afford the hotel the opera company is offering me a discount at. Have been begging everyone I know to help me find a couch to crash on, but no one seems to know anyone in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. I haven’t exhausted my options, but I pretty much HAVE exhausted the option of staying with a friend of a friend of a friend.
OK so I have to get well, I have to get money to pay back my album (who’s ready to make a donation??), and learn The Impresario in English.
Sorry this was such a negative post. On plus side, plans for album are going ahead and things feel great, Opera Language Circle tonight was really fun, and I don’t have to sing anything until late next month, except there’s a concert of Sorcerer but I already told them I might cancel so THIS TIME they got a cover. So the pressure’s off. Would still like to do it if I feel better- it’s with the NY G&S Society, and I had such a nice time when I sang Casilda in their Gondoliers sing-a-long!!
Everybody take care! Wish me well!
Singing Sorcerer Sick
I’ve never cancelled a performance in my life. But if I could have cancelled my show on Sunday, I would have.
You know how I’ve had a cold since last Saturday? I sang the two big “home shows” of The Sorcerer on it. To people who were impressed I could sing while sick, I said, “This is the beginning of the cold, it doesn’t effect me much vocally. We’ll see how I do next weekend, when the coughing has set in.”
I don’t know about you guys, but my colds follow a particular pattern. They usually come on whenever I a. forget to take my immune booster pills, and b. decide I don’t need to use my humidifier. Then I get a sore throat and generally achy, exhausted, and sick-feeling. Followed by some congestion/sneezy/nose-blowy type stuff, and finally a bad coughing. It’s in this last phase that the vocal damage happens. Until I start coughing I can get through whatever singing I need to- last week I did not only The Sorcerer but a concert where I sang a very difficult coloratura Bach cantata aria. Once I start coughing, it’s all over. Things in there get so swollen it usually takes me several weeks to completely recover. Cough drops can help keep the coughing under control, but in my experience just make the vocal problems worse. (They are very drying!)
I lost my voice in the middle of my Saturday night. All of a sudden I tried to talk and it was half gone. I spent the rest of the night trying to coax it back, but to no avail- talking hurt and I had no head voice.
But there was nothing I could do- I could NOT afford to miss my weekly church gig (and it was payday!), and as for the Sorcerer, I had no cover. If it were a concert version, someone else could have sung it on book- but as it was a fully staged production, I couldn’t expect someone to just go on and have my role memorized.
I went to church and sang my first notes not knowing what would come out. It turned out to be my voice, but at about 40% of it’s normal volume. My whole range (as far as church music is concerned) was accessible, but I was singing through taffy. We had an extra long break (when the choir director announced that he had meant to tell us to come later than usual since we didn’t have much music to practice, but forgot, we wanted to strangle him in unison), which I used to call the director of Sorcerer to ask her if she still wanted me to come even though I was singing like crap, she said yes, as expected. And told me that the 2nd soprano lead (the Constance to my Aline) was also sick and would be choking through her part. I spent the rest of my break running a few blocks to the nearest convenience store to buy a Red Bull.
The conductor of The Sorcerer was meeting me at the GW bridge and driving me to the show, but we were cutting things extremely close and got there just three minutes before curtain. Even with my pack of Halls in my purse, I suffered some bad coughing fits on the ride over, and arrived in much worse vocal condition than I had been in at church. I got changed into my costume in the back of the car.
When I first went onstage, I again had no idea what would come out. This time, the result was worse than anyone expected. There were notes, but they were clearly hoarse, sandpapery, and frequently phonated with delayed onset. I was soooo glad they had made an announcement beforehand that the Constance and I were sick. (She sang her first aria transposed down a fourth, and her second she skipped down the octave at every opportunity.)
I hid a cough drop in my sleeve, but fortunately never needed it- I only started coughing very briefly once, at the opening of the second act. Other than that, my voice actually got better as we went along- only because i had stopped coughing, so my larynx had time to calm down. By the end of the second act, I sounded, if not myself, at least pretty.
My dialogue delivery would have suffered sorely in a bigger room, but since it was a small theatre I was able compensate. Since the only way I could talk was by squeaking, I just made my character that much ditzier. It actually worked really well! I could have been playing her that way all along.
It could have been upsetting, but to me (and the other soprano, as we discussed as she drove me home) it was really just hilarious. It was a relatively low-key performance- it was fully staged, but in the theatre of a fancy retirement home, where no one critical would hear us- and with piano instead of orchestra, and in a smaller room than our previous shows. So we had some room for error.
So in the end I had quite a nice time, and am glad I did it. And I didn’t break my track record of never having cancelled a performance. On the other hand, I feel that I shouldn’t have felt so pressured to do the performance, which you can imagine I was in no mood to do (I needed to go home and sleep!!!). Is it my fault that the company didn’t have covers for the leads? No!! Why should I pay for it? I probably delayed my recovery by overusing my voice like that. I couldn’t leave them in a lurch, and I am always happy to be a trooper, but I was already going above and beyond the call of duty to be doing this production in the first place (as I was a last-minute fill-in when they fired their lead soprano shortly before opening). Now, I am the last person to need a cover, as I never cancel, am extremely healthy, and am very much a trooper, but they should still at least have had chorus members covering each lead they couldn’t do without. I mean, I was really in no condition to sing.
Food for thought. But I had fun anyways- I was just laughing at the absurdity of my own voice- and I told the company afterwards that it was less “The Sorcerer” and more “The Croaking Chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes” (a little Pirates reference there!). I hope to be very well very soon. I’ll be recording my album soon, after all!
That’s all for now- everyone take care! Take your vitamins and use your humidifier!!!!
Kelly’s Getting Vaginal Rejuvination
Oh dear! I have been sick all week. Not like that sick though? Like, I can tell I have a cold but it’s mild enough that I’ve been functional for the things I have to do, like sing and go to appointments. But then beyond that I just sleep. Like today, I slept like 12 hours, then I went to the bank and to have coffee, then I came back home with plans to do all these things, but instead I fell asleep again for another 2 hours. Then when I was out being busy and doing things for several hours, and I come back at like 2am going oh man how am I going to fall asleep since I slept so much already today, but now I’m pretty tired! So I don’t think it’ll be an issue.
I realized I was sick right before leaving for our first of two home shows for The Sorcerer. Fortunately, it did not seem to affect my voice much, and I sang just fine both days. I felt like crap, but you know, when you’re onstage it doesn’t really affect you, just when you’re backstage. I even managed to sing a virtuoisic aria from a Bach cantata (Jauchzet Gott) at Opera on Tap last night.
Here’s what else I did yesterday: I recorded and uploaded my new song, Kelli’s Getting Vaginal Rejuvination. See, remember how I was solicitating donations/sponsors for my album? Well, my friend Philine found a friend who was willing to make a very generous donation if I wrote a song called “Kelli’s Getting Vaginal Rejuvination.” You know, in the spirit of “Monica’s Getting her Tits Done.” Naturally, I took them up on it, and the finished song is here. I obviously had fun with it. Anyone else want to make hefty donations in exchange for me writing ridiculous songs? It’s a really fun game, I swear!
So I have a ton of things to get caught up on, since I’ve been so under the weather and have been sleeping or laying in bed during my normal “homework” time.
Oh btw I had a meeting with the producer for the album, and have been discussing the next steps with the band. Things are actually working out and I’m excited. I still need money. I applied for a loan at the bank, hopefully tomorrow they’ll tell me if I’m approved or not. But either way I need more donations and sponsors. Or some really good-paying gigs at least. Somebody hire me?? I do weddings!!
No news about the summer opera. Ariadne is slated for November. I guess I’ll do it, since I haven’t clarified my plans to cut town.
See y’all soon!
Love always,
Amanda
